


house of cards

by orphan_account



Category: Arctic Monkeys, Miles Kane - Fandom
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Gen, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:40:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22177213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Miles watches his phone ring and contemplates his relationship with Alex.
Relationships: Alex Turner/Miles Kane
Kudos: 21





	house of cards

**Author's Note:**

> this is only a snippet of a fic I’d intended to write, and my apologies if it feels incomplete or inclusive, rather like the relationship it’s meant to show I suppose.  
> 

There weren’t many people on Miles’ never reject list, his mental list for phone calls,that was. Though the man in question was on a lot of lists of what Miles would never refuse, could not ever refuse. You couldn’t after all survive with only one half of your soul after refusing the other.

but that was a needlessly dramatic way to express a rather simple fact in his life, just another fact that he’d come to accept as unchangeable.

Facts were good, they provided a foundation on which you built up so much, the first pieces of paper in a house of cards.

Vaguely, he was aware that he was probably staring at his phone like it was just a ring away from turning into a snake and engulfing the hand he saw was reaching for the device without conscious orders from his brain, but he couldn’t help it. It was always that way, the moment Scott Walker’s Jackie filled a space, and everyone, everyone except the man on the other end, he wouldn’t ever know, had learnt to expect him diving for the phone like he was saving a favourite child from certain drowning.

And sometimes that was just what it came down to.

Alex _needed_ him, needed him to listen to something before he would burst with the issue, needed him to make sense of Alex’s wonderful, beautiful, incomprehensible mind, needed him to pick him up from places he got lost in, needed him to come tow him away from wherever he’d got himself stuck, needed him to talk the band into telling Alex have his own way. Alex just needed him there. That was the way of their friendship, they needed each other.

He preferred to think of it as _symbiotic_ , despite the selfish sound of the word, because an alternative that suggested itself, and which most people would consider closer to the truth was codependent.  
  
He and Alex weren’t, he hoped, that bad. And anyway, he had always liked to think of the two of them as vines, growing up entwined, around each other, each year causing more of each to wrap around the other so you couldn’t ever tell where one began and the other ended, and which propped the other up more.

_Codependent?_

More importantly Vines, or rather a word sounding the same was the reason he didn’t relish the idea of answering thag particular call from the man he could willingly dedicate every moment of his life talking to. He wasn’t quite sure what he might end up saying.

A glance at the clock when he’d first woken showed him it was 4AM, around 10 PM where Alex was then. And not quite the time when the man whould be too deeply in his cups. But he knew, knew with the instinct he couldn’t doubt when it came to Alex that the man wasn’t alright.

That was how it always went.

At tunes he got Vague apologies and declarations of... a different sort of love from Alex when alcohol had sufficiently overrode his inhibitions.

At other times, Alex rambling on about a song he’d come up with, a nebulous idea for now, nothing but a tune he strummed on his guitar until he was too weary to go on and fell asleep. Or ideas he wasn’t certain of, symphonies he’d write and attempt to abandon, grand scores he’d attempt to work on all alone.

And _it hurt_ , knowing Alex was hurting, hurting because of them, of knowing the inebriation he thought he found comfort in, the state that lead him to make things worse each time, of knowing that Alex in control of his actions could never come out and say those things he’d whisper into his phone when it was late at night and he wasn’t thinking anymore.

And yet, once more he found himself answering before he was at risk of missing Alex’s phone call. He could never reject that man in anything.


End file.
